At long last, I can buy marijuana, legally, here in California. I don’t need a note from my doctor, and I don’t have to pretend to be sick. I can walk into a store, admire their selection of fine cannabis products, and if I have enough money, and I can prove that I’m over 21 years of age, I can buy my choice of them, without having to look over my shoulder to see if there’s a cop around. I’ve waited a really long time for this. I’ve been dreaming of this day since 1978, and working for it since 1988, but I guess I’ll have to wait a few more days.

I had hoped that I would not have to drive far to visit one of these new recreational cannabis retailers on January 1st. People around here like to call Southern Humboldt County “the Heart of the Emerald Triangle,” but unfortunately, the two venders seeking retail recreational cannabis licenses in Southern Humboldt are still not quite open for business. When I inquired of the Humboldt County Cannabis Chamber of Commerce as to where I could find the nearest recreational cannabis retailer in my area, they refered me to a list compiled by Leafly.com, listing all of the cannabis retailers in the state that have registered with them to be open on January 1st.

I only found one retailer on that list in Humboldt County, EcoCann in Oldtown Eureka. I had never heard of them before, but a couple of days later, I found their circular in the North Coast Journal, offering preroll joints for one dollar, one per customer, with coupon. It’s about 80 miles from our place in Ettersburg to Oldtown, a long way to drive, and a lot of money in gas for a one dollar joint, especially considering that all of my friends and neighbors have tons of weed, and I can hardly go to town without someone giving a wad of buds for free.

Still, I want to buy weed, legally, in a licensed store. Well, not exactly weed, but I want to buy some cannabis products. I have weed. Everyone I know has weed. If I was out of weed, I would buy weed in the store. Hell, if I was out of weed, I would’ve driven to the store on New Years Eve and camped out overnight so that I could be their first customer on New Year’s Day, but I’ve got plenty of weed, so it can wait a few more days until we need to make a trip up North.

On Jan 5, I have an appointment in Trinidad to record a couple of segments for my KMUD radio show: Monday Morning Magazine. I think I’ll visit the dispensary then, and turn my visit to EcoCann into a segment as well. Celebrating legal cannabis will be the cover story of the show, which will air on KMUD (streaming and archived at www.kmud.org) on January 8, from 7-9am, about the time this post drops on LoCO. We will talk a lot about this new world we call legalization with a live panel of local entrepreneurs who have set sail to discover it, including Graham Shaw, Holly Carter, Kevin Jodrey and Lelehnia Dubois.

I’m really excited about this. I feel like a kid anticipating his first trip to the candy store. It’s been years since I had a medical recommendation, and when I did go to the trouble of getting a medical recommendation, it was only because I had shitloads of weed, and felt I needed the legal protection. Once, at Wonderland Nursery in Redway, I used my medical marijuana card to buy a bottle of Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup for my mom, who has Parkinson’s disease, but other than that, I’ve never shopped for cannabis at a dispensary before.

The circular from EcoCann tells me they have quite a few strains of fresh cannabis flower for sale, and the pictures of the buds look pretty nice, but I’ve got plenty of flowers. Right now, I’m more interested in some of the new, value added, cannabis products that you only find at a a legal dispensary. Last year, I sent my mother a box of chocolates from the Humboldt Chocolate Company behind the gazebo in Oldtown. My mother, naturally, assumed that anything that had “Humboldt” in the name, must be infused with cannabis, and that’s what she told her friends, when she shared those, very delicious, but non-medicated, truffles with them. Of course, they all thought they got high from them. I would like to give my mother some chocolates that really will get her and her friends high, and I’ll bet they have them at EcoCann.

For myself, I’d like to find a way to ingest cannabis that doesn’t harsh my vocal chords as much as smoking, and that doesn’t involve sugar, and I’m sure my girlfriend would appreciate it if I didn’t stink the house up with smoke so much. I might want to try a vape pen, and I’ve heard great things about a cannabis throat spray.

I still find it hard to believe that I no longer have to feel paranoid about carrying weed (but I probably will, for the rest of my life), and I can go to a licensed store to buy it, even if it takes two hours to get there. So much has changed in forty rears, mostly for the worst, but this change is long overdue. Really, it’s about time.

We’ve done pretty well, here in Humboldt County, at keeping the big chain stores at bay. Arcata has an ordinance against them, and public outcry keeps Walmart cowering in the back of the mall. Obviously we value our local culture, and our local economy. However, our State Senator, Mike McGuire has gone ahead and invited a new big chain store to open a franchise here in Humboldt County, and he expects us to be happy about it.

At a recent “Opioid Crisis” themed town meeting, Senator McGuire announced that Aegis Treatment Centers would be opening its 32nd drug treatment clinic here in Humboldt County. Clearly we need more drug treatment here in Humboldt County, but do we really need the “Taco Bell” of treatment centers? Has Aegis been offered incentives to locate here in Humboldt County? Were those incentives also offered to the Open Door Clinic who has been treating everyone’s medical needs here for decades? What about our local health care districts, or Redwoods Rural Health Center? Were they offered incentives to offer drug treatment locally? Do we need a big company from out of town to suck money out of our community, just so we can have a methadone clinic in Humboldt County?

If you think I’m kidding about the “Taco Bell of treatment centers,” you should look into Aegis for yourself. Aegis pays low wages, overworks it’s staff, and has a very high turnover rate. The employee reviews of the company that I read shared a few common themes. Nearly everyone complained of the low pay, many mentioned the high case load, and most complained about the lack of opportunity for advancement. Even employees who rated Aegis highly, said that it was “a good place to start,” but not a good place to work long-term.

Patients complain of inflexibility, impersonal, constantly changing staff, and many complain that Aegis likes to keep people on Methadone, because it’s more profitable to maintain someone on methadone than it is to help them quit opiates altogether. We’ve been treating narcotic addiction with methadone for decades, but it has never worked very well. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an outpatient methadone clinic in Humboldt County before, but couldn’t we do this better ourselves?

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Dr Amanda Reiman, who lives in Mendocino County, for my radio show, Monday Morning Magazine on KMUD (Nov 13, 8-9am archived at http://www.kmud.org). Dr Reiman has done some very interesting research into the therapeutic benefits of cannabis within the harm reduction drug treatment model. Dr Reiman has found that cannabis helps people quit hard drugs, and cannabis helps people who use hard drugs, use less hard drugs. This is a significant breakthrough in addiction treatment, and here in Humboldt County, we should be on the cutting edge of cannabis aided addiction treatment research. That sure won’t happen at an Aegis methadone clinic.

Dr Reiman works with a treatment clinic in southern California called “High Sobriety,” which uses cannabis alongside other forms of treatment. Why shouldn’t we have our own, homegrown, cannabis enhanced, drug treatment clinic here in Humboldt County? We need more and better drug treatment here in Humboldt County. We have plenty of people who need help. We have plenty of cannabis, and we have the peace, quiet and serenity that people need to heal.

We have an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths here in Humboldt County that we must address, and if there’s one thing we should know by now, it is that we will never arrest and jail our way out of this problem. The people who are addicted to drugs in Humboldt County are our neighbors, our friends, and our kids. We don’t need to give them criminal records, and we don’t need to farm them out to some assembly line methadone clinic for the rest of their lives.

We have a unique population, and a unique set of circumstances here in Humboldt County, and I think we need a unique, homegrown approach to drug treatment. Research into the therapeutic potential for cannabis in drug treatment should be a high priority because we desperately need more and better drug treatment options. We need every tool in the toolbox to help the people of our community recover from the War on Drugs.

If there is one thing we can learn from Aegis, that is, that there is money to be made in drug treatment here in Humboldt County. Besides that, you can bet that people who use cannabis to quit hard drugs, will find that cannabis helps them stay clean, too, and people who used Humboldt Cannabis to get clean will probably use Humboldt Cannabis to stay clean. The potential for brand loyalty is enormous. This idea will make people rich. You’re welcome.

While pot industry shills like Hezekiah Allen warn of mass unemployment and economic hardship without continued taxpayer subsidized price supports for marijuana, we should realize by now that drug dealers will say anything to keep the cash rolling in. In truth, government price support programs for marijuana don’t support our local economy, here in Humboldt County, so much as they suppress it.

The War on Drugs created a windfall of profits for anyone who produces marijuana. This windfall buried our real economic potential, which we never really developed because pot paid so much better. We’ve become a marijuana mono-culture dependent on corrupt politicians, violent cops and greedy drug dealers all working together to exploit and oppress the American people. That’s not an economy; that’s a crime. Besides, most of the so-called “jobs” in the marijuana industry, aren’t even considered part of the economy.

Most people who make a living from marijuana, don’t pay into Social Security, and aren’t covered by Workman’s Comp, so they don’t count as being “employed.” Since they aren’t looking for work or collecting unemployment, they don’t count as “unemployed” either. Thanks to the War on Drugs, the marijuana industry has become a black hole that sucks people and money out of the economy and leaves a trail of poverty, addiction and death in it’s wake.

We don’t have prosperity here. We have organized crime. What’s the difference? In prosperity: people have jobs and homes and their kids get enough to eat and learn how to succeed in the world. In organized crime, people go missing and turn up dead, honest work is for suckers, and kids become addicted to drugs, and commit suicide. The difference is pretty stark really. The only way to avoid seeing the difference is to measure the cash flow exclusively. Even from that perspective, organized crime doesn’t really look like prosperity; organized crime just looks as attractive as prosperity to people who don’t care about anything but money.

Here, you could always make more money growing weed than you could make doing anything else, so growing marijuana became a “no brainer” for people around here. Consequently, we have a lot of “no brainer” type people who feel entitled to middle-class incomes and lifestyles, but have no education or skills outside of herb gardening. We’ve been overrun by dull, greedy people who believe that cannabis is the only thing of value. They don’t mind being one-trick-ponies, even if it is a kind of a dirty trick, but most of us have more potential than that.

It’s been about 10 years since Anna Hamilton first asked the question: “What’s After Pot?” The unanimous response from the community has been “More Pot!” Instead of beginning a movement to diversify our economy, people treated Anna’s wake-up call as the shot from a starting pistol that signaled the beginning of the greenrush. Everyone doubled-down on dope, but now the pressure is on.

Small growers get squeezed, and everyone’s profit margins shrink, as big players with deep pockets gamble for control of the legal cannabis market. As more states legalize cannabis, and bring industrial scale production online, the price of raw cannabis continues to drop. Downward pressure on the price of cannabis opens up more economic potential by multiplying the opportunities for value added cannabis products. The new openness of the legal market means that there’s a whole world of cannabis lifestyle products and service tie-ins to explore. However, lower prices for raw cannabis means that Humboldt County’s marijuana windfall will evaporate.

There’s plenty of economic potential here in SoHum for anyone with the imagination, ingenuity and drive to realize it. Unfortunately, 40 years of cannabis windfall has pretty much bred the imagination, ingenuity and drive out of us. Instead of facing reality and working together as a community to diversify and humanize our economy, we’re all busy milking the War on Drugs right to the last drop. The question is: What is the last drop for you? Is it $800 a pound? $500? $300? How low can you go, and still make money from weed in Humboldt County?

You can get more for your weed if you sell it retail, and work it into our tourism appeal, but then you have to be prepared for a whole bunch of unruly young people coming here to get high. We have that now, and it’s the thing people complain most about. If we want this area to remain famous for herb, and you still want to make a living from it, we’ll need to be more accommodating to pot smokers of all stripes, especially the young and unkempt.

To sell herb retail, in a legal market, Humboldt County needs to be as accommodating to unkempt hippies as fast food retailers are to obese people, or bartenders are to alcoholics. It comes with the territory. If the idea of graciously serving hippies with dogs and backpacks and making them feel at home seems repugnant to you, maybe you weren’t cut out for the marijuana industry after all. Around here, we don’t recognize our economic potential. Instead, we call the cops on it, beat it senseless on the town square, and convene town meetings on how to get rid of it.

If we suffer massive unemployment or economic hardship because of falling cannabis prices, it is only because the windfall from the War on Drugs blinded us to our true economic potential and robbed us of our moxie. If we succeed in this new legal environment, it will be because enough of us realized that we have other skills and talents that we never called on, because we always had marijuana. We may find that those skills and talents lead us in new directions and towards more satisfying lives. In that respect, falling marijuana prices just might be the best thing that ever happened to us.

The War on Drugs is a horrible crime against humanity, and if we ever manage to bring this bloody chapter in American History to a close, we should make sure that it never happens again, but there’s one thing I miss about the whole police-state, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude of the ’80s and ’90s. Back when you could still go to jail for growing weed, drug dealers used to keep a low profile, and they kept their mouths shut. I miss that.

These days drug dealers never shut up, and the more they talk, the dumber they sound and the uglier they look. I realize that they’re just trying to organize, raise their profile, and lobby on their own behalf, but the more they do it, the creepier it gets. They can’t help it. They have an untenable position. War profiteers hate to see wars end, but they should know better than to complain about it in a room full of veterans, widows and orphans.

I didn’t realize just how dumb and repulsive drug dealers really were, until I heard them complain about the falling price of marijuana. Really, you should keep that to yourselves. The people out there forking over large sums of cash for paltry quantities of cannabis don’t feel your pain. They probably don’t even like you, and only tolerate your company because you have weed. If they could get it somewhere else, for even a dollar less, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Complaining about the falling price of cannabis, and lobbying politicians to keep prices high, didn’t win “The Humboldt Brand” any friends among cannabis consumers. We want the price of cannabis to fall further, much further. We want the price of cannabis to fall below what it costs to produce it in the forests of Humboldt County. We don’t care that this long overdue price correction will affect growers negatively. In fact, that’s what we want.

Putting dangerous drug dealers out of business has always been half the reason to legalize marijuana in the first place. Black market drug dealers earned their reputation for violence. Black market drug dealers earned their reputation for destroying communities, and black market drug dealers earned their reputation for destroying the environment. In one way, you could say that black market drug dealers helped the cause of legalization by creating more social and environmental problems than legal marijuana possibly could.

If Humboldt County growers want to convince us that they are anything but dangerous drug dealers, who should be driven out of business, complaining about the falling price of marijuana and lobbying to keep pot prices high doesn’t really help their cause. Complaining about the bad press they get every time another grower gets caught doing something horrendous to the forest, or someone gets killed at a grow scene, or in a drug deal, or another hash lab blows up, doesn’t really help their image either.

It doesn’t look good to be more concerned with how a problem affects your image than you are with the problem itself. We ignore sex trafficking, hard drugs and violent criminal gangs in our community, as well as way too much environmental damage and worker exploitation, just to protect the wholesome fiction of “Mom and Pop Grower,” and the “Small Farmer,” that we so desperately want to project to the world. We dismiss anyone who doesn’t fit into that happy, mythical stereotype as “a few bad apples” no matter how many of them we find.

Now they want us to call them “farmers” instead of “drug dealers.” They like the term “farmers” because farmers have political clout. Farmers also do a lot of environmental damage, but people cut farmers slack, because farmers produce food, and everyone needs food. Dope yuppies think we should treat them with the same deference and respect as we do farmers. Of course, real farmers, working flat, fertile land with a tractor, could put Humboldt County’s so-called “farmers” out of business, overnight, if it weren’t for the law. If the value of your product depends upon an army of law enforcement officers, courts and prisons to prevent honest business-people from competing with you, you’re a black market drug dealer, not a farmer.

Humboldt County growers know that they cannot compete with real farmers on a level playing field. They know that their income depends on the War on Drugs. They don’t care. They know that they have blood on their hands. They know that prohibition makes their operations profitable, and they don’t care who it hurts. They just want the money, so now they dismiss our concerns about the environmental damage they cause, by claiming that they’re not as bad as the timber industry or the wine industry. That’s one more unbelievably stupid thing that growers say all of the time now.

Growers tell us: “The marijuana industry hasn’t done nearly as much damage to the environment as the timber and wine industries, so give us a chance.” That’s like saying “Compared to Charlie Manson and Jeffery Dawmer, I’m a pretty nice guy.” The timber industry took 96% of all the old growth forest and practically drove the Humboldt Martin to extinction. The wine industry decimated native salmon populations. Thanks to the brilliant, government sanctioned land use practices of those two industries, we can’t afford to lose any more wildlife habitat to blind greed. Sorry folks. Cannabis is a beautiful plant, but what’s going on here is ugly, and unnecessary. Without prohibition and the black market, no one would ever dream of wasting so many resources to produce cannabis flowers as we do here in Humboldt County.

When it comes down to it, what’s good for the environment, is also good for cannabis consumers and the economy. Legalization should bring large scale production of commercial cannabis out of the forest and on to farmland, and into places where it can be grown most economically. Legalization should bring down the price of marijuana and eliminate the black market. This will hurt black market drug dealers in Humboldt County, who would, clearly, rather devour the forest like locusts, leaving mountains of grow garbage and useless consumer crap in their wake, than face a world in which selling weed at inflated, black market prices, was no longer an option for them.

I think Humboldt County growers realize they face a perception problem, but they haven’t quite figured out that the problem lies not so much with changing the way the world sees them, but rather with changing the way they see the world.

I’ve read High Times Magazine off and on for years. That’s where I first encountered our local celebrity grower, Jorge Cervantes. In addition to his features in High Times, Jorge Cervantes has written several very popular books about marijuana cultivation including: Marijuana Horticulture, The Cannabis Encyclopedia, and Marijuana, Guerrilla Growing. He has also produced numerous videos about growing cannabis for growers who can’t read.

I never liked Jorge’s pieces in High Times, and I never bought any of his books. His voice never sang to me, but it was more than that. I have to admit that I didn’t like looks of the guy. I assumed it was my own cultural prejudice, so I cut the guy some slack. After all, I love cannabis, and I like growing it. I figured we would have some common ground, but I never found it.

Growing cannabis from seed was a spiritual experience for me. Cannabis is a righteous herb that deserves her place in the sun. Any power that would enslave, oppress, oppose or eradicate a righteous herb like cannabis has no place on this green Earth. Cannabis changed the way I see the world. Selling cannabis on the black market felt like pimping my sister. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I grow weed because I like weed, and weed likes me. Money has nothing to do with it.

I couldn’t write about growing weed without a lot of that kind of talk. It’s an attitude of respect, and I think that’s what cannabis consciousness is all about. Jorge clearly understood cannabis. He knew what she needed, and gave it all to her, but he never seemed to be able to grow enough. Jorge Cervantes always grew way more weed than any one or two people, or even an extended Rastfarian family could smoke in a year. He specialized in “guerrilla grows” and showed you how to infest every possible out-of-the-way place with an unsightly, dangerous-looking but vibrantly productive cannabis garden. Jorge didn’t seem to care about anything except producing pounds, and the attitude he conveyed in his articles really turned me off.

I thought High Times made a bad move when they started running his articles, especially when they showed his disguised face. Jorge looked like a caricature of a Mexican drug dealer with his trademark Che Guevara beret over cascades of jet-black dreadlocks. Dark Ray-bans and a sinister black goatee completed the image. Jorge Cervantes disguised himself as a racial stereotype that fueled the War on Drugs. That’s why I thought High Times made a mistake when they put Jorge’s picture on the cover and got behind him in a big way.

Still, I thought, “What have I got against a Mexican guy who grows weed?” I didn’t like his “get rich quick scheme” attitude, but I can understand where he might not have had the same opportunities available to me, a white working-class kid from Akron, Oh. I really didn’t like the stereotype image, but I know what it’s like to perpetuate a stereotype. I don’t put a lot of effort into it; being a hippie just comes naturally to me. Even so, I didn’t like his writing style or the layout of his books, even if I could get past the racist stereotype on the cover.

I much preferred to get my cannabis growing advice from Ed Rosenthal, who also authored many popular books on the subject, as well as a regular column in High Times. Ed spoke to me. Ed Rosenthal showed you how to grow cannabis in almost any unused space in your home. He showed you how to grow your own, in your own home, so you could end your dependence on the black market. Ed always advocated for legalization, in his writing, and for real. I met Ed Rosenthal at a couple of legalization rallies, and watched him whip-up a crowd to work for legalization. Ed Rosenthal is an inspiring guy. I never saw Jorge Cervantes at a legalization rally.

Especially now that he feels safe enough to reveal his true identity. Now that the rest of us have done the work necessary to change the law, look who popped out from behind that old racist drug war stereotype. It’s the lily-white George Van Patten, son of the equally white Dr. Cecil R and Ester Van Patten. I imagine they must be very disappointed in their son. I know I certainly am.

Here’s a guy who hid behind a racist stereotype of a Mexican drug dealer, for decades, while he got rich off the War on Drugs that he help perpetuate through his stereotype image. The weed was real. The greed was real, and the sneakiness was real. Only the Mexican was phony.

How many Hispanic men have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement because they look like Jorge Cervantes? How many years did he set back the cause of legalization with that hokey get-up? How can anyone be proud of that?

It’s a problem that a lot of people have around here. They have land, and a home, and plenty of money and stuff, and they know how to grow weed, but they don’t have a lot to be proud of, and, in some cases, kind of a lot to be ashamed of.

I got a phone call during my engineering shift at KMUD last Friday. “Did I hear you say your name is John Hardin?” the caller asked.

“Yes.” I replied.

“Are you the John Hardin who calls pot farmers ‘maggots’?”

“I don’t think I ever called them ‘maggots.’” I responded, but I did let him know that I am the “Hardin” who writes for LoCO. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity. I imagine that if I stayed on the line, he would have shared his opinion of my writing, but I had buttons to push and cards to read so I kept the call short. I don’t think he was a fan.

I’ve said a lot of things about growers, but I don’t think I ever called them “maggots.” I can understand why growers might feel like maggots after reading my column, but I don’t think I’ve ever called them that directly. I could be wrong. It’s all out there. If you can find it, I’ll admit it, but I don’t think so.

I know that a lot of people around here don’t like hearing what I have to say. I skim the comments. I even get hate mail on occasion. None of it bothers me. I don’t respond to the comments at LoCO because they pay me to write; they don’t pay me to bicker. Besides, the people who object most vociferously to my work, rarely make points worth responding to. They call me names, accuse me of saying things I did not say, and then they drop the “H” bomb.

“Stop the Hate!” or “What’s with the Hate?” or “Why does LoCO publish Hardin’s Hate Speech?” If I hate anything, I hate prohibition. I hate the War on Drugs. I hate it for how it has effected me, and for what it has done to my friends. I hate the War on Drugs for the economic injustice of it, as well as the criminal injustice of it. I hate the War on Drugs for what it’s done to the American people, and to people around the world. I hate the War on Drugs for what it has done to this country, and I hate what the War on Drugs has done to this community.

I was out there with Jack Herer, in 1990, selling The Emperor Wears No Clothes on the streets of Boston. I helped organize the first Boston Cannabis Freedom Rally that year, and founded Mass Grass, the Newsletter of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition. I love marijuana, and I think cannabis prohibition is a crime against humanity. OK, I admit it. I hate. I hate the War on Drugs. I hate the War on Drugs almost as much as I love marijuana, but the critique I offer is valid.

I understand that the War on Drugs has been good to some of you, and that many, if not most of you, can scarcely imagine a world without it. I understand, and I sympathize. I tell the truth about the War on Drugs, and sometimes the truth hurts. I might say it in the most provocative and insensitive way possible, but it’s still the truth. That’s what makes it sing, and that’s what makes it sting.

I know that a lot of dope yuppies don’t like to be reminded that it’s not beautiful marijuana, but the ugly injustice of the War on Drugs that puts money in their pockets. I know they’d rather be called “farmers” than “drug dealers,” and that they would appreciate some respect, but I think that there are entirely too many people sucking up to them as it is.

At one time, it was heroic to grow weed out here. Today, it’s heroic not to. Today, we need more heroes in this community, and we aren’t going to grow more heroes by glorifying drug dealers and sucking up to them. We grow more heroes by telling the truth about the War on Drugs. We grow more heroes when we call drug dealers on their bullshit, and we grow more heroes when we honor honest working people with a decent living.

However legalization shakes out, we’ll feel it here, and we can expect significant economic fallout. Competition in the cannabis industry will continue to drive down prices, and profit margins. Lower margins lead to consolidation, consolidation leads to layoffs and unemployment. Even if the legal cannabis industry makes Humboldt its home, it will certainly employ fewer people than it does now, and most of those people will work at fairly modest pay scales.

I don’t think I’ve ever called growers “maggots.” I might have said they seem like maggots. I might have said something like, “Growers infest these forested hills the way maggots infest an infected wound on a dying animal.” I might have said something like that, and if I haven’t said it before I’m sayin’ it now. Either way, I say it because it needs to be said.

This community faces serious problems and imminent rapid change that threatens our way of life, our quality of life, and our community. Unless we can face reality, we will never solve anything. We’ll just keep pointing fingers, getting frustrated, and acting ugly, like we’ve done for years, to no avail. This stuff all needs to be said, and I figure, if it needs to be said, I might as well say it.

I’ve written about stupid names for strains of weed before, but now I think I’ve figured out why stupid names matter. To market weed effectively, the cannabis industry needs names that appeal to the intellect and aesthetics of a 15 year old boy. I smoked weed for the first time on my 15th Birthday. I think a lot of people start smoking weed at about that age, so the same logic that applies to naming a hip-hop artist or a professional wrestler also applies to naming weed.

You need a name that sounds cool to a 15 year old boy. That’s why we have pot called: “Green Crack,” “God’s Pussy,” and “Chem Dawg.” From that perspective, the latest “hot” strain around here, “Blood Diamond” fits the bill. I would have bought “Blood Diamond” weed when I was 15, and I would have liked the name too. I haven’t smoked any “Blood Diamond” yet, but it gets rave reviews, from everyone except trimmers.

To me, it’s all just “weed.” I’m sure I’d like “Blood Diamond” weed if I smoked some. I like all weed, and most of the weed around here is pretty good. Don’t ask me to tell you which weed is better. If I’m high on good weed, the last thing I want to think about is how this weed compares with the last weed I smoked. I’m high now. That’s what matters.

I think “Blood Diamond” is a poetic name for weed right now. The term “Blood Diamond” was coined for diamonds mined in conflict zones where they fund bloody civil wars. Many brutal conflicts rage in, diamond rich, Central Africa. Warlords use the money they make from mining and selling these diamonds to buy weapons, ammunition and supplies to advance their personal ambitions of wealth and power through violence and bloodshed. The UN Banned the import of diamonds from conflict zones, but the black market has ways around such things, so “Blood Diamonds,” diamonds from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Angola and a few other countries, still find their way onto young women’s fingers here in the US.

Now “Blood Diamond” marijuana is finding its way into America’s bongs. While “Blood Diamonds” in Sierra Leone finance a bloody civil war fought by child soldiers, “Blood Diamond” weed supplies an army of underage street dealers who risk violence, expulsion from school and jail time, on the front lines of America’s War on Drugs.

In war zones, arms dealers will happily accept payment, in diamonds, for weapons and ammunition, so warlords dig for diamonds to finance insurgencies that terrorize and destabilize fledgling democracies. In Trinity County last week, cops raided a house in which, in addition to the typical, industrial quantities of cannabis, and commercial quantities of hard drugs, authorities found over a hundred firearms and more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

“Blood Diamonds” sparkle as bright as diamonds mined in peaceful democracies like Canada, and most diamond dealers have a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy. The same can be said for the marijuana industry. Cannabis consumers rarely know much about where their marijuana comes from or how it was produced.

“Blood Diamond” is just another meaningless moniker designed to brand cannabis and appeal to prospective 15 year old clients, but it says a lot about the cannabis industry and the War on Drugs with an elegance and sense of irony I really admire. Apparently the product is pretty good too. I can only assume the grower who developed this strain, knows the industry, and the plant, very well indeed. I appreciate his honesty and eloquence.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)